Friend: Woman got threats before death

Police divers search Lake Mic Mac in Dartmouth looking for clues late last year into the death of Christina Cline. (JEFF HARPER / File)

A Dartmouth woman whose body was discovered in Shubie Park woods a year ago had been receiving threatening letters, says a friend.

Christina Cline’s body was discovered on a remote, dead-end path off one of the Dartmouth park’s main trails on Nov. 19, 2011.

Police have not said how the 27-year-old mother of three was killed, but they have said they don’t believe her death was a random act.

Jana Peterson believes whoever wrote the letters to Cline is likely the killer or at least was involved in her death.

Cline and her children’s father, Dustin Hales, had been fighting over custody, friends and family have said.

On the night of Nov. 18, Cline had left her children with Peterson. Cline was attending a course put on by family court on parenting during family breakup, Peterson said in an interview earlier this week.

But Cline never came back for her kids.

By the time Peterson and some other friends decided to report Cline missing late in the morning on Nov. 19, her body had been found.

But police haven’t located Cline’s purse, where she usually kept some disturbing letters, Peterson said.

“She showed me threatening letters that were sent to her. (Finding them) would be like the smoking gun.”

On Dec. 13, police arrested a man and a woman in connection with the Cline investigation. Sources have confirmed that man was Hales and the woman was his girlfriend, Victoria Weir.

The pair were released without being charged and a few days later they got married. At one time, Weir lived with Hales and Cline at their Roleika Drive home.

Peterson is beginning to give up hope that the case will soon be cracked.

“I have my doubts that this is going to go too far in the near future.”

She said she recently had a disturbing conversation with a man who told her he was a retired investigator and had worked on Cline’s case.

“He basically implied that police aren’t working as hard on it as they should be working on it because she was nothing but white trash, and that pissed me off. I don’t know if it is true.

“I ended up giving him a piece of my mind — because what he knows of Christina and what I know of Christina are two different things.

“She was a good person and she didn’t deserve this.”

Const. Pierre Bourdages, a Halifax Regional Police spokesman, said he can’t comment on opinions of retired police officers, but he insists that all homicides are top priorities.

“It doesn’t matter where the (victim) comes from, where they are living or what they do for a living.

“A homicide investigation is a homicide investigation.”

A victim’s personal circumstances do not sway the force’s decision on how much effort to put into an investigation, Bourdages said.

Investigators are remaining tight-lipped about the case.

“They are still very much investigating this. We have several investigators on this case.”

Before she was killed, Cline, originally from Ontario, was trying to be allowed to move her children out of the province and back to her parents’ home.

“Things were pretty rocky,” her mother, Kathleen McCartney, said in an interview Thursday. “She wanted to come home.”

The family realizes that had Cline left the province, she would likely be alive today.

“It makes it very hard,” McCartney said. “She should have been here.”

The plan had been for Cline, who had attention-deficit disorder, to go to a school for adult learners, get her GED and find a job.

Cline, McCartney’s middle child, had an older brother and a younger sister, and she was close to her mother. Cline and McCartney spoke on the phone almost every day, her mother said.

She remembers her daughter as “troubled, but a good kid.”

“She was a pretty good mother.”

McCartney worries about her grandchildren and eventually hopes to get custody of them.

“I get to talk to them every Friday night. They seem to be doing all right.”

She also hopes that whoever killed her daughter will be caught.

“Then, hopefully, we can put this somewhat behind us. We need closure.”

The family hopes that by speaking out it will prompt someone to come forward with information.

In the meantime, another friend of Cline’s, Jean Phillips, is continuing to keep the hunt for Cline’s killer alive.

Hours after Cline’s body was discovered, her van was found outside Phillips’s apartment. She said the keys to the van have not been found.

Believing whoever ditched the van after Cline was killed may have thrown the keys into the bushes, Phillips has asked the building superintendent and the workers to keep a lookout.